Sydney's food scene is booming—here's what to try now

Dawn breaks over Sydney’s seafood market and the clouds spill like fish scales across the vivid apricot sky. The flat-roofed, two-storey building beneath them — the largest fish market in the Southern Hemisphere — is already full of life despite the early hour, with workers busy unloading boxes of Balmain bugs (a species of lobster native to Australia). Seagulls squawk as they wheel in lazy circles overhead, while a pelican on the roof keeps eager watch over a crate of mud crabs.

“You here for the behind-the-scenes tour?” asks Michael Huls, a young man in wellies with a tattoo of a colourful octopus curling around one wrist. I can just about hear him over the frenzied seagulls. I nod. “Come with me,” he says.

I could be watching my first Sydney sunrise with the bulk of visitors on Bondi Beach, a mile to the east, where surfers barrel through the waves and joggers trace the path beside sandstone cliffs. But instead, I’m at Blackwattle Bay, a little-visited industrial inlet. To my west, the city’s silver skyline glints enticingly in the early light, the sails of the Opera House catching fire beside the steel arch of the Harbour Bridge.

I’ve come to experience Sydney’s home-grown food scene — from the seafood markets of Blackwattle Bay and the family-run oyster leases that fringe its coast to the bush-tucker gardens blooming at its urban heart. I’m hoping to uncover a different side to the city — one grounded in a deep connection to the land.

Over 15 tonnes of seafood are sold every morning on Sydney Fish Market’s auction floor. This fast-paced, multi-million-dollar auction has taken place at Blackwattle Bay since 1966, but only in the past two-and-a-half years have visitors been granted an inside look, thanks to the launch of a behind-the-scenes tour.

In the brightly lit auction hall, the air smells faintly of seawater. Michael — a former fisherman turned resident Seafood Educator — hands me a high-vis jacket as crates sweep past me across the wet concrete. “Most markets don’t allow the public to see their operations, but we want people to know where their seafood is coming from,” he says.

Today, he tells me, Sydney Fish Market is preparing for its next exciting chapter — a A$750m (£374m) revamp that will transform it into one of the city’s biggest culinary destinations. Early next year it’s set to reopen in a wave-like timber-and-glass structure. “It will be the most important building project in Sydney Harbour since the Opera House,” says Michael. Double the size of the current market, it’s part of a broader plan to transform Blackwattle Bay’s industrial waterfront into a more modern public space with more than 40 food and retail stands on offer. When it’s finished, it will have transitioned from being predominantly a place of work to Sydney Harbour’s largest food hall.

For now, though, it’s business as usual. Inside the auction hall, I stand behind the back row of tiered benches, where restaurant buyers in baseball caps watch the prices projected on the wall tick down in red. On the floor below, workers in waterproof trousers wheel crates of iced fish, bells ringing as more seafood is delivered fresh off the boats.

Michael explains that the buyers are participating in a Dutch auction — a system that was first used in the Netherlands to sell tulips, where bidding starts high and gradually drops until someone makes a bid. “This style of auction allows us to sell 1,200 to 1,500 crates per hour,” he says, raising his voice slightly over the auctioneer. “All our stock is fresh and we don’t refrigerate the room, so it’s important to move quickly.”

We move down to the auction floor to take in the day’s prize catch: blacklip abalone sea snails and coral-pink eastern pigfish, both native to Australian waters and difficult to find elsewhere. “About 60% of what you see here comes from New South Wales,” Michael says. “It’s all been caught within the last 24 hours.”

After the auction, we head to the food hall downstairs. There are dozens of stalls here, selling everything from crispy fried whitebait and lobster rolls to sushi platters and freshly shucked oysters. At one stand, I sample New South Wales prawns — bright orange and sweet — followed by scallop sashimi that’s cool and buttery on the tongue. A slice of smoked eel, topped with glossy Australian caviar, delivers a rich, almost meaty flavour, the pearls bursting with salt as they pop in my mouth. I finish with a freshly shucked Sydney rock oyster, smooth and firm with a clean, briny kick — exactly how a good oyster should be.

With the oysters fresh in my mind, by noon I’m on a northbound train headed for Brooklyn — an oyster-farming town near the rainforests of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park — to see where exactly they came from. I’m only an hour from the city centre but already I feel a world away. Sandstone bluffs tumble into bottle-green water bobbing with sailing boats, while mist rolls over swathes of eucalyptus forest. Along the water’s edge, Aboriginal rock engravings and ancient piles of discarded shells, known as middens, peek through the undergrowth.

I meet Bob Powell, the skipper of Sydney Oyster Farm Tours’ boat, at Kangaroo Point Jetty. I’m joining him to sample more Sydney rock oysters, this time straight from the source. We clamber aboard a small aluminium boat and quickly motor out across the Hawkesbury River — known to its Aboriginal custodians, the Darkinjung and Dharug peoples, as Dyarubbin — bound for the 17 oyster leases that belong to the Beaumont family, who have farmed these waters for three generations. The Hawkesbury River, one of New South Wales’ oldest oyster-farming areas, is the natural habitat of the Sydney rock oyster — a species that’s highly prized for its sweet, almost mineral taste.

As we cruise between floating racks, Bob explains how the farm works. Each one holds hundreds of baby oysters, which when mature are transferred into mesh bags suspended beneath the surface. “It takes around four years for an oyster to reach maturity,” he says. Bob steers the boat towards a cove lined with mangroves — a calm patch of river protected from the wind, where a row of white-clothed tables is anchored.

Waiting for us there is Jayson Barry-Cotter, part of the Beaumont family. He’s waist-deep in the water, wearing floral trunks and a leather Barmah hat, ready to welcome us to the family’s in-water tasting experience. “We took on this business soon after a disease outbreak in 2004, when most oyster farmers were giving up,” he tells me, as I pull on a pair of khaki waders ready to enter the water. Jayson explains that QX disease — caused by a parasite — has devastated oyster populations across New South Wales, forcing many farms to shut. “These tours are the only reason we’ve been able to keep going,” he says.

Jayson ushers me to my table, its crisp, white linen tablecloth vanishing into the murky green depths. It’s laid with a chilled glass of Champagne, plump pink prawns and 18 oysters, which Jayson patiently shows me how to shuck.

The first oyster I taste on its own to get the full flavour — creamy with a hint of sweetness, followed by a clean, mineral finish. The next, I dress with homemade shallot vinaigrette and lemon; the sharpness cuts through the brine, brightening the oyster’s sweetness. We finish with a salty shot of gin and oyster juice, drunk straight from the shell.

Native ingredients

Seafood may be what Sydney is best known for, but harvesting it isn’t the only way people have lived off the land here. The following day, I swap the salty air of the Hawkesbury River for the scent of spearmint eucalyptus in the Royal Botanic Gardens, on the eastern edge of the Central Business District (CBD). I’m here for the Aboriginal Bush Tucker Tour, where native ingredients tell stories far older than the city skyline surrounding me.

A sharp, sour punch hits me as I bite into a wild Davidson plum — a deep-purple fruit that’s native to the rainforests of eastern Australia. It’s smaller than a regular plum but shockingly tart, with a flavour that lands somewhere between rhubarb and lemon. Around me, the gardens hum with life: kookaburras cackle from the trees, red dragonflies flit above lily ponds and an ibis probes the soil for worms with its curved beak. I could be in the rainforest — the kind that covered Sydney long before its conquest.

My Aboriginal guide, Scott Bland, is standing beneath a canopy of palms, his khaki cap pulled low over his grey sideburns. He’s from the Wiradjuri, the largest Aboriginal group in New South Wales, with a cultural lineage that stretches back 40,000 years. His traditional lands, Wiradjur Country, lie further inland, around Wagga Wagga, but today he’s sharing stories here on Gadigal land, where the city of Sydney now stands.

“We acknowledge the traditional owners of this Country,” he says before we enter the gardens, to get permission for us to enter. “And pay respects to Gadigal ancestors past and present — because they still dwell here, in the trees, in the water, in the sky.”

Guiding us through the gardens, Scott picks some of his favourite tucker for us to try: midgen berries, tiny, speckled fruits with a sweet, gingery tang; powderpuff lillypilly, another native berry that’s pinkish-white and tart; lemon myrtle, a plant that smells like citrus and menthol; and the shrub Sydney golden wattle, whose flowers live up to its name. Nearby, the scent of peppermint eucalyptus — used by Aboriginal people for smoking ceremonies — hangs in the air. “It helps you smell like Country,” says Scott, “so the spirits accept you.”

As we stroll beneath ferns and sprawling Moreton Bay figs — their thick, rope-like roots twisting across the path — Scott pauses now and then to pluck a leaf or berry from the pathside shrubs. “When you look around, you see a beautiful garden,” he says, pausing. “I see medicine. I see tools. I see food.”

Later that day, I spend my final hours in Sydney strolling by the harbour as green and yellow ferries arrive from Manly and climbers scale the steel ribs of the Harbour Bridge. It’s dusk and a band is tuning up at a bar where a glamorous crowd is gathering at the water’s edge beneath that same apricot sky. Nearby, the Opera House blazes a fiery orange in the evening light. Sydney may be famous for views like this, but for me it’s the smaller things that will linger longest in my mind: the sweet taste of New South Wales prawns; the heavy scent of peppermint eucalyptus; and the briny kick of a Sydney rock oyster, shucked from the cool, green waters of the Hawkesbury.